Titre Testing

What is titre testing? A titre test is a simple blood test which will look for circulating antibodies in the dogs blood.

When doing a titre test its important to understand that the level of the titre (antibodies present) is irrelevant; it doesn’t matter if your dogs titres come back high or low, ANY measurable antibodies mean that the dog has immunity.

The antibody levels will go up and down depending what the circumstance is; a high titre doesn’t mean that your dog is more immune than a low titre. A high titre can mean one of two things: the dogs immune system has been over stimulated from a vaccine or that your dog has just come into contact with said disease, i.e. if your dog has come into contact with parvo, your dogs titre to parvovirus will be high. This is the immune system working to protect the dog. We often see low or 0 titres to distemper and hepatitis as these diseases are less common that parvovirus.

The reason the amount of circulating antibodies fluctuates is because it doesn’t makes sense for the dogs body to produce antibodies all of the time when they are not needed, this would put an unnecessary strain on the body, so the immune system will only produce them when they are needed to fight disease.

The immune system works in two different ways; when your dog is immunised this creates memory cells, it is these cells that are responsible for the duration of immunity, they cannot be measured by a titre test. This is where ‘immune memory’ is kept and when needed will spring into action and produce antibodies when challenged. This is why we know if any antibodies are present there is immune memory.

The down side of titre testing

A titre test can only measure antibodies at the present time, it cannot measure immune memory so can give a false negative result, i.e. if the test comes come back with a 0 titre this does not necessarily mean that the dog has no immunity to that given disease. It could mean that the antibodies were too low to measure at that time because the dog has not been in contact with the disease, but that does not mean that the dog does not have cell mediated immunity. A 0 titre could also mean that the dog is a non-responder, this means the dog is unable to respond to the vaccine and will therefore always be susceptible to the disease.

For example: my friends springer spaniel Bo had his puppy vaccinations. When he was titre tested his parvo titre was LOW and the vet wanted to give him a “booster”. My friend decided against it. She titre tested him again 18months later and this time Bo’s titre for parvo came back HIGH - this was with NO booster at all. This proves how the immune system works perfectly, you cannot “boost” the immune system of a dog who already has immunity.

The WSAVA Vaccination Guidelines Group (VGG) supports titre testing from 20 weeks onwards to confirm immunity.

If your vet does not offer titre testing you can go to any vet to get titre testing done. Ask for a vaccicheck, this is the most cost effective way to do it and shouldn’t cost much more that around £70. I would also email the practice manager if your vets do not provide this service and ask then if they would consider it, the more people who ask the more likely it is that they will start to offer this service.